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Driving new customer acquisition through an engaging brand experience
Over the course of about a year, I had the opportunity to work on redesigns for four Marriott hotel responsive marketing websites including Residence Inn, Courtyard, Fairfield Inn, and Springhill Suites. The Fairfield Inn responsive brand site redesign represented the last site I saw through completion.
Marriott engaged mcgarrybowen to rethink the Fairfield Inn digital branding and redesign their marketing website. At the time, the site was built on Flash technology which was not mobile-friendly and expensive to maintain. Our Marriott clients recognized the ascension of mobile technology and committed to creating a modern responsive website that would help drive new customer acquisition.
My role during the project:
During initial client scope discussions, I worked with the production team to define the process and schedule for the project. I had first-hand knowledge from the previous Marriott redesigns I worked on, and I pushed for more time to collaborate early and often.
Once the scope was agreed upon, I met with our strategist to help complete design brief. I worked with her to distill down the core assignment and we brainstormed some initial ideas for features that could activate against brand values. I also mapped out a high-level user journey to frame the problem we were trying to solve for.
User journey highlighting associated tasks in each stage.
I researched the typical needs of a business traveller and what criteria were most important when selecting a hotel. I used this information to prioritize the hotel features we promoted in the "our features" section.
User research informed how we prioritized the hotel features.
I examined competitor’s sites to gain insights on site structure and content priority. I also evaluated analytics reports for the current site to identify the most heavily trafficked content.
Sitemap illustrating the proposed site structure.
After the initial kick-off, we held a couple sessions where I met with the creative team and our strategist to brainstorm how we could bring the experience to life. We sketched out our initial ideas.
Whiteboard sketch from a brainstorming session.
I started by designing the mobile experience to ensure that the content would scale to larger screen sizes. While wireframing the experience I collaborated with our creative team to flesh out features and ensure everything mapped back to the brand vision.
Annotated mobile and desktop home page wireframe.
There were a handful of interactions that were common across all the Marriott Marketing sites I had worked on. This provided me an opportunity to iterate and refine these interactions while still ensuring a level of consistency across the sites.
The hotel search results page was refined over the course of the four Marriott hotel brand redesigns.
I continued to work with the creative team after the wireframes were approved by the client to evolve the experience as they applied the new branding.
Final desktop home page design.
During the development I partnered with our developers to ensure that the site was built according to the functional specification I wrote and test the site prior to launch. I also worked with our analyst to determine the final analytics tagging plan.
We launched the new Fairfield Inn marketing site and it was well received by our Marriott clients. Metrics reports confirmed improvements in key metric such as bounce rate and time on site.
It was rewarding for me to be given the opportunity to refine the hotel brand website experience with each successive Marriott site redesign. It was a unique challenge to create a familiar experience for Marriott users and differentiate each hotel brand so they felt unique. This was a testament to the fantastic work of the entire creative team and the support we received from our technology, account and production teams.
